


Warring with Pollution

by Enigel



Category: Good Omens
Genre: Gen, moody
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-06-14
Updated: 2004-06-14
Packaged: 2017-10-02 02:40:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enigel/pseuds/Enigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>War and Pollution have a competitive holiday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Warring with Pollution

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [Multi-Fandom Hometown Challenge](http://www.livejournal.com/users/rhipowered/321181.html); city: Bucharest, Romania, my actual hometown. It might be that I was a bit bitter about it at the time; things have improved some, but I think the ficlet is still actual...

She had taken the name Red again, but not the journalist job. She had taken no job at all. A near apocalypse should at least give one the right to a _proper_ holiday. The Balkans should be nice this time of the century. The Balkans had always been nice for her.

* * *

He was known as Whitey and looked younger than ever. He had a blurry recollection of the end of the previous century, and suspected that aborted apocalypse job had something to do with it. Pesky recycling campaigns annoyed him, and he thought a visit to his old glorious abodes might help take his mind off things. He set out for Ukraine.

* * *

By a slight miscalculation and the confusion of two bored clerks they met in the same place, between the Balkans and Ukraine, on a medium-sized airport that was dusty and dirty before Whitey even looked at it.

She acknowledged him when they were at the main gate. 'A little soon to meet again,' she thought. 'Especially after last time.'

"Back in business, young chap?" she said briskly.

"No, just visiting. But it already feels like home," he added, embracing the foggy horizon in a loving gaze.

It was not a humid day. The fog was just a cloud of dust raised by the capricious wind.

They went for a tea in a nearby restaurant that might have been nice and cozy before they entered. A fight broke between the waitresses over who should have cleaned the tables in sector 3.

The young woman at the only occupied table in sector 3 was bored. She felt like playing.

"I think it's a little conspicuous, the both of us here. Shouldn't we part territory, or something?"

"Really?" asked the young white-haired man sitting next to her.

"I have a challenge for you," she said in a bright tone.

* * *

She liked bikes and cars, the rapid flow of dizzying circulation, the howling claxons. Sometimes she felt like taking the pulse of the streets. (It was usually fast and irregular, like the heart of an angry man; it was even more so with Red around.) But if you can brave the smell, the network of public transport is the best way to connect to the spirit of a city.

The radio was blaring a politician's voice through the crackling speakers in the streetcar. The crowd received his words with nods of approval or disgusted frowns.

Ada S. was a shy person. She never had the initiative for a conversation, and most certainly not with strangers. She spoke when spoken to; (and sometimes not even then, but that was a different matter altogether).

As the red-haired woman looked at her and winked, Ada did what she never usually did. She started a conversation, with strangers, in a public means of transport.

"Can you believe these hypocrites?" she found herself yelling, partly with horror, partly with a dark satisfaction.

As politics are wont to be, the debate got very noisy, very fast.

Red left the streetcar at the first stop and went to enjoy a whiskey and a bar fight at the Intercontinental Hotel. Her crimson dress seemed designed to start conjugal fights, and it did. It felt good. The only annoyance was the pervasive dust that tended to coat her red shoes if she wasn't paying enough attention to glare it off.

An hour later she happened to get in the same streetcar; there were no familiar faces around, but they were arguing in a most familiar manner about the local politics. (The streetcar had changed a little bit, though. It had fewer intact windows, for instance.)

Red smiled and got off the streetcar again, and stepped into a puddle of gas.

* * *

The second day, a local soccer team won in front of another local soccer team, on the field of the latter. The more numerous supporters made sure the winners would celebrate the victory with fewer tires, windowsills and fewer cars altogether, and that they'd also hold black and blue souvenirs on their skin for a while.

The same day, an old disaffected factory started to produce again, much to everybody's amazement. Someone from the government had received a substantial gift, and someone from a highly polluting branch of industry had received an official stamp of approval, in precisely and necessarily this order.

They met in the evening, on the pier of a large artificial lake. Empty crisp bags, wrappers and an unidentified foam adorned the water, and they all seemed to float more joyously in Whitey's presence.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" he whispered, lost in admiration. "Did you know this lake was built on the place of an old cemetery?"

"Hm, no. And?"

"And they didn't remove the inhabitants prior to pouring concrete and then flooding," he said and shook his white mane in glee. "How are you faring?"

"There's a lot of hostility. It's really amusing. But it's kind of... dirty," she looked critically at her shoes.

"Yes, that's what I was saying. Beautiful. A total holiday."

She left him gazing wistfully upon the vividly coloured sunset. It had that special shade yielded by the right concentration of iron particles, when combined with a couple of rare elements that chemists handle with gloved hands, gasmasks and very concerned faces.

* * *

The third day, she drove in one of the worst famed areas of the city. Wolf-like looks followed her, and once or twice some of the bolder interlope leaders tried to approach her. They thought they were at home, but this was her ground, had always been, as they fuzzily came to realise as they were ready to cut one another over the arrogant, untouchable woman.

It was almost evening when she found what she had been looking for; the heart of the delinquency; the club where the rich owner of the winning soccer team received the homage of his underlings. She was thinking serious war.

The terrace was huddled under a large tree. Something like a tree adornment was glittering faintly in the dim light, and upon closer inspection it proved to be cassette tape, wound around the branches.

A man spat on the ground inches away from her feet and she scowled at the insolence, but the man hadn't seen her. Nobody was seeing her at the moment, because they were all entranced by the radiant screen of a television set. The men were talking loudly and chewing sunflower seeds.

A couple of half-hearted fights broke out that night, but they were drowned in a flood of insults. A carpet of half-munched sunflower seed rinds was growing on the cracked concrete, its black and white monotony interrupted here and there by brightly coloured wrappers and empty beer bottles.

Red looked instinctively around for Whitey's lithe frame, but he was nowhere to be seen.

* * *

"Well?"

It was the fourth day. As an angel of destruction, even though you have all the time, sometimes you don't want to waste your days.

"They're hopeless. You can't get a decent fight out of them, they're too entranced by the sound of their voice as they're swearing," snarled Red, a trifle tired of glaring dust and chewing gum off her shoes.

"Yes, I know," White smiled serenely.

"I must commend their creative insulting though, but it's so unexciting, it's just... language pollution. Oh."

"Yes," repeated White. "It's lovely."

"I guess they're yours then," shrugged Red and shook an ice-cream wrapper off her left heel. "Have fun!" she added and took off with a screech of tires and an angry horn tooting at "women driving".

"Yes, mine," White whispered possessively in her wake, stroking the closest branch of a birch, which promptly cowered and withered under his touch.

To the eyes of the passersby it was just the dry July heat and the dust, thickening the air and smothering all living things under a heavy veil from under which all colours appeared muted, running into each other and fading into a lifeless grey. They didn't see the man in impeccable white, but he was there, at the side of the boy who threw a wrapper in the street, in the air, at the wheel of the noisy car with a leaky carburetor. They couldn't see him, because he was everywhere among them.


End file.
